FFG’s Genesys surprised me by being good. I came to it in the expectation that the custom dice were a total cash-grab gimmick, and I was pleasantly surprised. I mean, the dice are still a cash-grab gimmick, but at least they’re a well-designed one. I may actually buy this game.

Burning Wheel surprised me by being the game that broke me. It was the first RPG that failed miserably when I approached it with my existing notions of how to play RPGs — i.e., you learn how to “role-play” and then individual RPGs are just sets of deck chairs you re-arrange on the Titanic.

Burning Wheel called bullshit on that and refused to work until I accepted that I could trust the text and simply run it as the author intended. This is a lesson I had to learn again with Mouse Guard, but it eventually sunk in.

In that sense, BW is also kind of answer to​ the next question, because it forever changed how I approach the hobby.

8 thoughts on “#RPGaDay 9. How has a game surprised you?”

Ooh, good answer. Dogs in the Vineyard did that to me. I’d never before read a game that told me how to run it. Not just general guidelines on creating NPCs and building stories, but hard proscriptions on what to do and not do.

< ![CDATA[Ooh, good answer. Dogs in the Vineyard did that to me. I’d never before read a game that told me how to run it. Not just general guidelines on creating NPCs and building stories, but hard proscriptions on what to do and not do.]]>